Christian Zeitnitz

Souncard Scope - Frequently asked Questions

Installation of the Program fails

The Soundcard Scope requires one of the following Windows operating systems: 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8 or 10. The program will not install on older versions of Windows!

The setup will fail, if you start setup.exe from the explorer without explicitly unpacking the ZIP file first. So right click on the ZIP file and choose to extract the files to a directory BEFORE starting the installation

Uninstall any previous version of the Soundcard Scope before installing the latest version

Changes to settings.ini has no effect

Since version 1.42 the configuration is stored in the file settings.ini (used to be scope.ini). The file can be found in the directory C:\Users\\Appdata\Roaming\scope. Only changes in this file and directory are actually recognized by the program. Delete the folder in order to reset to the files in the installation directory of the scope.

An error message is shown when starting the program

The error message, that the installed LabView Run-Time engine (version 7.1) is incompatible with the required one (version 7.1.1), is caused by a previously installed LabView Run-Time engine. In order to get the program running, uninstall the Run-Time engine (Control panel › Add/Remove Program › National Instruments ) prior to a re-install of this software.

Program licenses

The use of the software and of the documentation is granted free of charge for private and non-commercial use in educational institutions. No license is required, but if you like to support the further development of the program you might consider obtaining a private donation license.

Distribution and sale of the program is prohibited. Contact the author in order to obtain a resale license.

No soundcard is found - special problem with Windows Vista/7

Check in the hardware manager, that Windows actually has a soundcard correctly installed. Some soundcards recognize if speakers or a microphone is installed. This is the default behaviour under Windows Vista/Win7. In this case you have to check, that at least one input device is enabled in the sound settings (green check mark). If no input device is enabled, the program will complain about it and terminate immediately.

In Windows Vista/7 enable the Stereo Mix or Wave Device (not available for all soundcard cards) in order to avoid the above problems.

My sound card does not show up in the device list

Only devices which support the selected data format (sampling rate and bits per sample) are actually listed. If your device dows not show up, you need to change the data format in scope.ini to match the format of the device.

The oscilloscope shows no signal and the display is frozen

Unfortunately it sometimes happens that communication with Windows breaks down. Here only terminating and re-starting the program helps! You might have to kill the LabView process from the task manager.

No signal on the oscilloscope

Check for the correct selection of the input device in the control panel.

If the signal generator is used and a channel is switched on, the input device selected in the audio mixer has to be the Stereo Mixer (somtimes called Wave Device). Some soundcards do not allow to select an internal source as a recording device. In this case you might need a special driver like Virtual Audio Cable.

No sound audible

In order that the generator signal is audible on the speaker, the appropriate equipment has to activated. Check the audio mixer and enable the appropriate device.

Strange jumps in the signal

A large signal can exceed the maximal allowed input voltage. In this case the maximum possible value should actually be recorded by the soundcard. With some sound cards, however, this leads to an overflow and instead of a large positive value, a large negative value is sent, which leads to a complete distortion of the signal. If such jumps are observed, the input signal should be attenuated

Program reacts very slowly

The CPU load on a slow computer (less than 1GHz) can go up to 100%, especially in the frequency analysis mode. In this case the program will react slowly. A solution is to reduce the amount data to be processed by changing the sampling rate in the file scope.ini or reduce the number of bits per sample. In order to do this, uncomment the line with the key word SamplingRate and put in a value of 22050. This corresponds to a reduction of the amount of data by a factor of 4 from the nominal data rate.

In the XY-view the persistence setting has a strong impact on the system load. You might have to reduce the persistence time to obtain again a more responsive system.